'Just Friends' is just so-so

Chris Klein walks away with the movie.
By ROGER MOORE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Comedy is hostile. And the hardest thing for a movie comic to do is to hang on to that anger, that edge.
Look at Chris Tucker. Young, hungry and angry. And funny. Then fat and happy and not funny. Same with Steve Martin.
And now Ryan Reynolds. We could see the edge rubbing off in "Waiting." With "Just Friends," that edge is but a distant "Van Wilder" memory.
How else could mild-mannered Chris Klein, the "nice boy" of "American Pie," walk off with Reynold's movie?
In "Just Friends," Klein shows us comic acting chops we never knew he had, playing a variation of his sweet boy you wouldn't mind bringing home to mom. As the folk-singing, visit-the-old-folks-home paramedic with a sexual dark side, Klein is just a hoot. Maybe Katie Holmes did him a favor.
Reynolds stars as Chris, an effeminate high school senior with a weight problem. Reynolds, in a very convincing fat suit, lip syncs to All-4-One's "I Swear." Chris longs for the fair Jamie (Amy Smart), who is, alas, content to write "BFF" in his yearbook. Chris doesn't want to just be "Best Friends Forever." After a graduation night humiliation, he resolves to never again be trapped in "the friend zone."
Fast-forward
Ten years later, Chris is a cynical LA player, a record company exec trying to sign the sexually voracious ditz Samantha James (Anna Faris).
Faris learned her "go for broke" comedy on the "Scary Movies." Her hilarious Samantha is Britney Spears and Ashlee Simpson -- the dumbest parts of each.
Events conspire to send them both to Jersey for the holidays, where Chris can take back up with Jamie, who may be "the girl who peaked in high school," or lose her to loser-turned-player Dusty (Klein) by reverting to his dweeby high school self.
This script, by Tex Davis, is pretty smart about high school and the personas we shed and yet somehow reacquire when we head "back home." There's some nice, two-fisted interplay between Chris and his brother (Christopher Marquette).
This could have been the "Something About Mary" for the nostalgic-for-1995 generation. Director Roger Kumble even trots out a Mary-ish chorus of carolers who wander through scene after Christmas scene. But Kumble, who did the ambitious "Dangerous Liaisons" spoof, "Cruel Intentions," never hits his groove.
As romantic comedies go, "Just Friends" is just a lunch date. And everybody knows there's no kiss at the end of a lunch date.